


Hint Number Eight

by petreparkour



Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: (again), (to the tune of 'everything is awesome' from the lego movie), AIM - Freeform, Angst, Arc Reactor, Arc Reactor Issues, Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Spoilers, Based on Iron Man Concept Art, Basically: the team finds out what Tony has done to himself, Blood and Injury, Canon-Typical Violence, EVERYONE IS SAAADDDD, F/M, Gen, Hurt Tony Stark, M/M, Peter Parker Feels, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Secrets, Spiderson and Irondad, Steve Rogers Feels, Steve Rogers is incredibly unobservant, Thanos (Marvel) is a dick, Thor (Marvel) Feels, Tony Stark Feels, Tony Stark Has A Heart, Wakanda (Marvel), basically 6000 words of angst, im still mad steve didnt see tony's suit soo, this entire fic is basically me screaming about the iron man suit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-29
Updated: 2018-11-29
Packaged: 2019-09-01 23:51:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,283
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16775422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/petreparkour/pseuds/petreparkour
Summary: Stark looked different than the last time Steve had seen him. His face was smeared with blood, drawn and pale, and he had a hole in his side. In hindsight, Steve thought it was then. Thought he caught a hint of metal across Stark’s shoulders, down his ribs, through the tattered remains of his undersuit. That was the first hint.It took eight hints for him to realize. Hint one, hint two, hint three, hints four and five and six and seven. The long sleeves, the flashes of metal. The new arc reactor, the one that Steve thought he had caused (driving the shield deeper and deeper until that light flickered out and it was just Tony staring at him, terrified, trapped in a metal shell that was supposed to be his salvation). The realization that Tony Stark would doanythingto protect the Earth, and that he would damn himself to keep it safe.(a suit of armor around the world, and yet he couldn't save himself)Inspired bythis concept art.





	Hint Number Eight

**Author's Note:**

> Two interesting articles about Iron Man's armor and the potentials behind it can be found [here](https://screenrant.com/iron-man-armor-avengers-infinity-war/) and [here](https://screenrant.com/iron-man-mcu-story-missing/). 
> 
> Not mine. Marvel's. Beta'd by SeetheSea.
> 
> \--
> 
> To subs: I PROMISE THIS HAS PETER IN IT

The first time Steve saw a hint of it was when the orange-and-blue spaceship crashed outside of Wakanda.

They were never exactly sure how Nebula found them so quickly; Tony was unconscious for the last leg of the trip, and the force fields around the city had been raised once again. She still managed a semi-decent landing with broken stabilizers and half an engine. Her joints snapped into place after they pulled her from the wreckage; she had shielded Tony with her body.

Stark looked different than the last time Steve had seen him (in a snowy, cold cave and Steve was driving his shield into the reactor that every instinct was telling him not to touch, _don’t touch,_ it was his lifeblood and it was his doom). The lines on his face were more pronounced, and it seemed like he had begun to stop dying his hair dark. His face was smeared with blood, drawn and pale, and he had a hole in his side.

In hindsight, Steve thought it was then. Thought he caught a hint of metal across Stark’s shoulders, down his ribs, as Shuri raced him to her labs. He was healed in half an hour—Steve didn’t even see him until he was already on his feet, clinging to Rhodey and shaking. His face was buried in the crook of Rhodes’ neck, and the colonel caught his eye. Steve left the room.

Pepper was gone. She had been in the shower, and her ashes had washed down the drain.

Her engagement ring had been on the edge of the sink, waiting for her to slip it back on. Steve caught Tony fingering it over and over before he finally put it on a chain around his neck. It was too small for any of his fingers, anyway.

Steve and Tony never formally made up from their disagreement. They worked in close proximity because of necessity, not want, and they hardly spoke on non-business terms. It hurt Steve more than he’d like to admit.

The team was disjointed, now. The raccoon and Nebula, the cyborg who had saved Tony from whatever and whoever it had been, largely stayed to themselves. Thor and Banner, surprisingly, stuck together too.

Steve had hardly gotten over the changes in the Asgardian—in the heat of the battle, he had missed the discolored artificial eyeball, the mess of scars slicing over Thor’s eye, webbing over his temple and up into his scalp. Mjolnir was gone, Bruce told Steve a few days after the attack. So was Asgard. So was Loki, and Odin, and Thor’s evil sister, and everything Thor had ever known. None of that showed on the god’s face, and he seemed to fool everyone with his subdued humor. Bruce had been struggling with the Hulk for weeks now. No progress.

Natasha showed back up after a few days of incommunicado with Clint in tow. His entire family was gone. He spoke only to her, and Thor, for reasons that Steve suspected would be too painful to hear. He never asked about Loki.

Tony, after a few days, was forced to return to the US to deal with the worldwide crisis that had torn the universe apart. Rhodes didn’t go with him; he had spited Ross on Steve’s behalf. Tony was the last Avenger still signed onto the Accords. A day later, he gave a worldwide press conference. The cuts and bruises left from his fight had healed. Makeup concealed the dark circles under his eyes, and he smiled like his fiancée hadn’t just been turned to dust and swept down the drain.

Everything will be okay, he promised. The Avengers are working on it.

Nobody bothered to ask how. Who the Avengers even were anymore.

Two days after, Tony Stark went before the UN and tore the Accords down. The Avengers returned to the compound that night, to give the Wakandans a place to mourn their king. Rocket and Nebula stayed behind.

Thor, with his new axe and a steel glint in his eye, visited Stark one day and then vanished in a beam of light. His parting call had been odd: something about permanent changes not always being good nor bad. Tony stayed in his lab for two days after Thor left.

Bruce said he’d gone to look for his people—the ones who had survived. A warrior had been with them—their friend, a Valkyrie. Steve didn’t ask.

Tony wore long sleeves all the time now. That was the second hint.

It wasn’t like Tony _never_ wore long sleeves before Siberia. But he had mixed it up—sometimes he wore a ratty hoodie, and jeans, others, his Black Sabbath t-shirt and sweatpants. It usually depended on the project that he was going into—what was least (or sometimes most) likely to catch on fire.

Now, it was nothing _but_ long sleeves. The odd outfit that he’d been wearing back from Titan, the blue and orange one, had been replaced in all black. Many times, Tony just wore a black long-sleeve or one of Pepper’s sweaters (none of them ever mentioned that). But no short sleeves. Ever.

Steve still didn’t know where the Iron Man suit had gone. Tony had obviously used it in his fight against Thanos—(it had been Thanos. Nebula had messaged him from Wakanda one night a week after Steve had asked her about it. She said he had held his own longer than the Sorcerer Supreme, like Steve knew who that was)—there was no way he would’ve survived if he hadn’t—but nobody had mentioned it and Steve didn’t ask.

The new arc reactor was concerning, admittedly. At first, Steve was afraid that it had been because of him (driving the shield deeper and deeper until that light flickered out and it was just Tony staring at him, terrified, trapped in a metal shell that was supposed to be his salvation). Rhodey had pulled him aside and said that this one wasn’t powering Tony’s heart, and Steve had breathed a little easier.

Steve wasn’t allowed in the lab anymore. Maybe that was the third hint, or maybe that was just a consequence of the document that had torn them all apart. Before the Accords, he’d had (limited) access with Tony’s permission. Now, FRIDAY stopped him before he even got to the hallway. After the first few times, he stopped trying.

The only ones who actually _had_ access were the ones who had never betrayed him in the first place. Rhodey. Bruce. Thor, surprisingly, even though Tony used to complain that the god would sooner break everything than fix something. Nebula and, to some extent, Rocket, even though the raccoon had built a bomb with Wakandan circuitry the day after Nebula arrived.

The fourth hint was probably when Steve found out what the new arc reactor actually _did._ Maybe the most obvious one yet, but for the first one where he had _seen_ it and ignored it.

Iron Man had refrained from making an appearance on purpose; they wanted to assure the world that the “Ex-Vengers” were just as capable of keeping them safe as the Accords-sworn Iron Man was.

But finally, there was a day where it was necessary. A cosmic anomaly down in Cuba—some creature that had somehow absorbed power from the soil and the leftover radiation from the bombs in the Cuban Missile Crisis. No Thor. No Hulk. The team took one look at the frantic, unsteady TV clips from the event and collectively decided that Tony was coming with them.

The new Quinjets were faster than Steve had remembered. They had different engines, handled differently—Clint had nearly maneuvered into a mountain the first time he’d piloted it. He’d huffed that it was much more sensitive than it had been and flew it perfectly for the rest of the mission.

Tony rode with them on the Quinjet, more because Steve asked him to than out of any desire to ride in his own creation. He mostly just paced in the back of the jet, fingering the reactor, no suit in sight. It was Natasha’s turn to fly, so Steve and Clint both sat in the back with Stark, making small talk with no real consequence. Clint had only started talking the other week.

After staring at the wall for ten straight minutes, Tony made a sound of frustration and pulled a pair of sunglasses from somewhere. He frowned for a moment, then hollered for Natasha to pick up the pace, that the creature had nearly reached Havana. “I should have just flown,” He said to himself. “I’m faster.”

Steve didn’t argue (even though he hadn’t been fast enough to catch Rhodey). Tony almost fell down as the jet noticeably accelerated, and Steve caught a flash of metal up his sleeves (hint five). 

You’d think that after five hints, Steve would finally catch onto _something._ No such luck.

The jet set down in the center of Havana five minutes later. The streets were eerily deserted; everyone had already been evacuated. There were faint roars and the grating screech of tearing metal coming from a few blocks away.

Tony still wasn’t in his suit. Both Natasha and Clint were giving him weird looks, and Steve couldn’t blame them—even during their whole “Civil War,” Tony had still had a compartment in which he stored the suit. Now, he was just wearing that odd black outfit and the stupid sunglasses.

“FRIDAY,” Tony said, and Steve shot him an odd look. The AI had to be speaking to Tony, even though even Steve’s ears couldn’t pick it up, because Tony said that it was coming this way and all they had to do was wait.

It burst through an apartment building thirty seconds later. It was black, oily, and formless. It writhed and curled in on itself, over and over again, like a washing machine cycling. Steve expected Tony to voice his typical complaints of how he’d never get that slime out of the suit, but it never came. He just stared at it and sighed.

Clint tried an arrow, and it sunk right in and dissolved into the membrane. He made a sound of frustration and sheathed the bow across his back. Steve considered throwing the shield, but Tony held out a hand to stop him.

“It’s highly acidic,” He said, studying the thing through his glasses. How was he telling all of this from one glance? “When it wants to be, seems like. The pavement isn’t dissolving at all. I wonder—”

The thing had developed dozens of tentacles—now, it sort of resembled a half-octopus, half-mammal thing. It opened its oddly-formed, toothless maw and roared. The windows around them shattered. A tentacle shot towards them. Natasha and Clint both rolled out of the way, but Steve and Tony weren’t so lucky.

Steve looked wildly to Stark, bracing his shield and getting ready to leap in front of him, but the billionaire was already in motion. He pulled two drawstrings on the jacket, tugging it close to his body, and tapped the arc reactor twice. Steve was staring at him dubiously, hardly able to move, just bracing for impact, and then metal was _crawling out of the reactor,_ out onto his chest, over his shoulders, down his arms.

Tony pulled off his sunglasses and then they were absorbed _into_ the suit (that explains where they had come from, then). And right as the tentacle was about to slam into them both, the Iron Man mask closed over his face and a shield formed from Tony’s arm as he flung himself to the side, straight into Steve. The shield deflected the tentacle as the repulsors activated and they were flying up and away.

Clint muttered an expletive and Natasha actually stared for a moment before shaking off her surprise. Even Steve, who was literally clinging to this new suit, was struck dumb. What the _hell._

Tony set him down next to Clint, then rocketed off without a word. Steve managed to order Natasha to sweep for stragglers and for Clint to get to high ground, then started after Tony.

The tentacle-monster screamed in rage and reached for Tony again. Steve’s heart leaped into his throat, and he readied himself to throw his shield, no matter the acidic skin or whatever the engineer had said. There was no way Tony could dodge that; it was going for him from five different directions and Tony wasn’t even moving. Yet all of the sudden, he was—out of nowhere, shells were closing over his fists and blasts of light, white-hot and focused, were beaming out towards the monster.

In just a few seconds, three of the tentacles were smoking lumps on the ground and the fourth and fifth were on their way. The repulsors kicked in and he was rocketing forwards. His hands were normal again, and blue-tinged projectiles shot off of his back and stuck onto one of the remaining limbs. They exploded just as a blade replaced his left hand and he sliced clean through the last one. It collapsed in a steaming, slimy heap. A beat later, the other one exploded.

The creature shuddered for a moment. Its head, which just consisted of a gaping maw and an odd arching that had to be the forehead, faced Tony and seemed to stare. Steve felt the same way.

How had he come up with this? Steve had been living in the 21st century for a while, and even he, who tended to just accept that there was even more advanced technology, but even this was ridiculous. It was insanely more advanced than it had been when they’d had their fight in Siberia not all that long ago. No wonder he’d been able to hold up against Thanos for so long.

Steve knew that right now, if the creature decided to attack him, his reflexes would be too slow to dodge. His brain had turned off.

The helmet didn’t retract, but the suit’s speakers and the comms were suddenly projecting Tony’s voice. “Hawkeye, remember that sonic arrow I gave you the other day?”

“Yeah,” Clint’s voice said over the comms uncertainly. “Uh, I hope you don’t want me to—”

“I do,” Tony interrupted easily. “On my signal.”

“I hate your signals,” Clint muttered, but Steve could hear him fiddling with the arrow as he waited.

The blob seemed to regain its composure, because it screamed again and shattered any remaining glass the vicinity. But instead of reaching out with its tentacles again, it started ever so slowly making its way over to them.

“Tony,” Steve warned. Stark ignored him. Natasha didn’t say anything; she was in a side street, shouting things in Spanish. Nobody responded to her. Clint blew out a breath.

The thing kept extending, and Tony still wasn’t moving. The curvy armor looked flimsy, like it would crumple in with the faintest of pressure like a tin can. Steve resisted the urge to throw the shield as hard as he could and spirit Tony far away from this place. He knew that Tony was an adult, that he had been through a lot; in this moment, he didn’t care.

It inched closer, closer, closer. Finally, _finally,_ when it was a few mere meters away, Tony moved.

He raised his fists, and blasters formed over Tony’s hands again. Instead of hot blasts of energy, a peculiar spray of some form of metal shot out, covering the slimy creature in a hard crust. The loudest scream yet echoed through the low city streets, and Steve curled into himself, covering his ears. Distantly, he hoped his eardums wouldn’t burst.

Some garbled audio came from Tony’s comm, but Steve couldn’t make it out over the horrible noise. He faintly heard Clint say, “I really hope that was the signal,” and then the creature exploded.

Slime sprayed everywhere, covering Steve, Tony, Natasha, who had just emerged from an abandoned alley, and the entire street in a brackish black mess. Miserably, Steve spat some out of his mouth and straightened up, surveying the ruined mess of his uniform. Tony turned around and tried to shake some of it off of his arms.

“Gross,” Clint commented gleefully from his unslimed part of the roof. In response, Natasha scooped up a handful of it and hurled it right into his face.

Hints numbers four and five weren’t enough. Six came soon after.

Of course, the Tower was attacked. The lights flickered once, twice, and then died completely. That shouldn’t have been possible—Tony has even _said_ that, many times, yet it happened anyway. It was nearly midnight, and Steve was still awake. So was Tony.

So Tony was awake when they attacked him.

Steve was in the gym, Tony in his workshop. They were only three floors apart, and since most of the soundproofing relied on the arc reactor’s infinite energy, Steve heard the shout of alarm three floors up.

They later learned that the reactor had been removed for repairs, and the Tower had been on a temporary one which had been drilled into and destroyed. No FRIDAY, no security, no nothing. Steve ran all three floors in less than thirty seconds. Tony was already on the ground when he got there, chest smoking. RT node gone.

Tony gasped out for Steve to go get them, that they couldn’t get their hands on the nanotech and _goddammit, Rogers, this one isn’t keeping me alive, now get to it!_

There was a tear down his shirt. Another flash of metal, but Steve was already turning away. Tony wrapped his arms around his chest as though trying to shield himself.

Steve caught them in two minutes. Natasha dropped in on them from above; Steve hadn’t even known she was in the building. Steve ripped the permanent reactor and Tony’s nanoport from their bags, and Natasha snapped one’s spine. Clint showed up halfway through in pajama pants and wearing his quiver and shot two in the throat, pinned the last to a wall. Natasha glared at him petulantly for ruining her fun.

During interrogation, the survivor stammered something about working for the Scorpion, an old enemy of Spider-Man before he’d… well. Tony stormed from the room, fuming. The nanoport had been replaced less than an hour before. Bruce had chided him the whole time, but he’d been adamant of not being without it. Steve had tried to find somewhere to put the intruder away, but Natasha ended up breaking his neck. Steve didn’t have the heart to tell her off.

Thor came back two days after. He had a woman with him, in tattered ivory-and-gold armor and white markings on her face. They spoke on the roof for twenty minutes, and she punched a hole through the wall and pulled a flask. Thor later introduced her as the last Valkyrie, the rest of whom had been slaughtered by his elder sister more than a thousand years ago. Steve had learned not to question these things long ago.

Steve caught them both down in Tony’s workshop once. The inventor had asked them down, but Steve hadn’t known that at the time. He’d only seen two others, one who Tony _barely knew,_ the other who had been gone for more than two years, and both who were allowed into his workshop where Steve _wasn’t._ Their backs had been to the windows; Thor had his arms crossed, and his shoulders were tense. Steve could only see Tony’s face, resigned and pained, as Valkyrie reached out to touch something on his chest. Tony caught a glimpse of Steve through the wall of godliness, and Steve fled.

Maybe that was hint seven. Maybe that was just Steve’s jealousy or paranoia. Either way, Tony wasn’t trusting him with something; whether that something was life-threatening and private or petty and fearful, Steve wasn’t able to judge—after all, he’d kept far too many secrets from Tony.

With hint number eight, it was literally laid out in front of him.

It started, as all good things do, with a kidnapping plot. This was far from the first time this had happened—in fact, within the first year that the six (or five, after Thor left) Avengers had gotten together as a team, there had been three unrelated attempts at kidnapping Tony. He was the rich one, the weak one, they seemed to think. Two out of the three times, they’d been stopped (by Tony) before they got out of the Tower. The third time, he was gone for a day. Natasha and Clint reached out to their contacts, and before a ransom note could even be sent out, Tony was back with only a broken wrist as consequence.

This time was different. Steve had been avoiding Tony for a while—both old and new wounds had been opened, and he thought that it would just be… better. Easier. He hadn’t been keeping track of the inventor’s whereabouts. It wouldn’t have mattered, anyway. It happened in Queens.

FRIDAY managed to track down images from the traffic cameras on the block where Tony had been. It happened almost too quickly to follow—no passerby would have had any chance of interfering, even if there were some around. Men dressed in all black, masks covering their noses and mouths, slipped out of the alley that he was passing and and stabbed a syringe into his neck so smoothly that it took two tries for Natasha to figure out what had happened. They dragged him into the alley. Gone.

They couldn’t track him. The RT was disabled. Natasha and Clint both contacted three of their contacts in the worst gangs in the country—nothing. Twelve hours after he went missing, FRIDAY received a grainy video from an unknown sender. It was Tony.

They’d ripped his shirt off. The nanoport still glowed with its happy little blue light, but Tony’s arms were tied behind his back. The image was blurry—so blurry that Steve could hardly make out Tony’s face. There was blood smeared on his torso, and something else wrong with it—the image was so bad that Steve couldn’t exactly tell what it was, but fuzzy gray lines ran up his stomach and chest. Chains, maybe?

He was awake and gagged. A man in a simple business suit and one of those ‘V for Vendetta’ masks was standing next to him, arms crossed smugly across his chest.

“We are not your normal organization,” he started, and Steve got up and started to pace.

They only got a hint once they figured that Tony had been blinking in Morse code. It took three watchthroughs and, as he conveniently returned, Thor’s fresh eyes to notice.

_P-H-I-L-A-D-E-L-P-H-I-A,_ he blinked. _A-I-M._

“Of course,” Natasha muttered, and went to get her phone.

The man in the mask gave them an ultimatum—either the Avengers turn in “the Asgardian and Captain America,” or they would use Tony’s tech and gain the means to retrieve the two “unusual specimens” on their own.

Steve wondered how they had planned on keeping Thor subdued for more than five minutes at a time. Steve, too.

Twenty minutes later, Natasha stalked back in, displeasure clear on her face. “I couldn’t get an exact location,” She snarled. “None of my contacts get anywhere near AIM. We’re gonna need some bait.”

Thor volunteered before Steve could.

Steve tried to dissuade him, to convince him that Steve should go instead, but everyone else agreed with Thor. They had much less of a chance of being able to restrain the god than Steve. It didn’t mean he had to like it.

They sent a message to the (unhackable—FRIDAY and Natasha had both tried) email address that AIM had given them. They said that they would give the Asgardian over, as he was depressed and useless to them anyway. Thor laughed at that. They told AIM that Steve was still of use to them and that they would not be giving him up. Take it or leave it.

AIM took it.

The Avengers put Thor in “Asgardian-power restraining” cuffs, which were really just handcuffs with gibberish carved into them for Clint’s own amusement, and brought him to the meeting place AIM had indicated. Tony was already there.

It happened much faster than it should have; Clint was positioned on the roof, Natasha at a side door. Steve and Bruce stood beside the chained-up Thor, as though the Hulk could and would make an appearance if the deal went sideways. It was too dark to see anything but Tony’s face. He had a black eye, and he was mouthing _no_ over and over again. One of the AIM agents cuffed him over the head.

The man in the _V for Vendetta_ mask was standing beside Tony, and he gracefully extended a gloved hand. The leather squeaked as he snapped his fingers. “Send the Asgardian over,” He purred. “And then we will give Stark to you.”

“Like hell,” Tony gasped out, and the agent hit him over the head again.

Steve shoved Thor forward a step. He could tell that Thor was fighting to keep his expression properly murderous, but the god looked like he could laugh at any moment.

“We don’t need him anyway,” Steve said harshly, trying to come up with something appropriately scathing. “He’s sad all the time. Cries a lot. Pretty much useless.”

That was probably the wrong thing to say, as Thor looked like he was even more desperately trying to avoid smiling. AIM didn’t seem to pick up on it, or didn’t care. “I’m sure,” Mask-dude said amusedly. “Nevertheless, we will take it. Come here, alien.”

  
  
Thor stiffened, fingers twitching, but when Steve nudged him, he started forwards. AIM made no move to intercept him until he was nearly a meter from the captive Tony and the leader. Then, one of the agents moved almost too quickly to follow—he pulled something from his sleeve and jabbed Thor in the side with it.

To Steve’s surprise, and Bruce’s horror, Thor stumbled and fell to his knees with a pained noise. Tony’s eyes flashed with recognition as he tried to lurch forwards, a horrified _no_ on his lips. The agent let him go suddenly, and he stumbled forwards several steps before Steve caught him.

“Plan’s gone south,” Clint said from the roof, concern leaking through the comm. “Thor is down.”

“Thor is down?” Natasha repeated incredulously. “Confirm, Hawkeye.”

  
  
“Thor is down,” Clint said again. “Confirmed. AIM hit him with something nasty. Couldn’t get a good look, but it looked sharp and it was glowing.”

Natasha muttered a curse in Russian. Tony leaned against Steve, and Bruce wordlessly handed him a blanket to wrap around his shoulders. “Why did…” Tony managed. “Why did you give Thor up? You can’t—you need—”

“We have a plan,” Steve hissed to him as two agents stepped forwards to grab Thor.

“Where’s the axe?”

  
  
“We left it at home.”

  
  
A skylight above them shattered and an arrow buried itself into one of the agents’ chests. He stared at it for a few moments, at the red, blinking dot on it, then stumbled backwards. A small explosion detonated, spraying gore all over the other agents and Thor.

“Nasty,” Tony muttered, pulling the blanket tighter around himself. “That the signal?"

A grappling arrow shot directly down, providing a clean way for Clint to get down and for Bruce and Tony to get up. “Yep,” Bruce told him, tugging him forwards. “Let’s go!”

  
  
“I’ve got Thor,” Steve said at the same time as Natasha barked out, “I’ve got Vendetta.”

  
  
Clint leaped down with a _whoop_ as Natasha burst in a side door. Half a dozen agents pointed their guns at her, and she raised a cool eyebrow. Steve slung the shield across his back as the agents surrounding the god fell away with arrows through their throats. He bent over the kneeling, half-conscious Asgardian, tugging at the cape. “Thor,” He said, and one of the agents screamed in pain as Natasha snapped his spine. “Thor, buddy, we gotta go.”

Thor looked blearily up at him, his mismatched gaze blurry. “Steve?” He managed, and Steve tugged him up. “Let’s go, pal.”

  
  
Thor didn’t argue, but thunder rumbled above them. Tony was still at the bottom of the rope, and Steve’s gaze locked on three more agents who had gotten past Clint and Natasha. Tony slipped, and Thor’s gaze darkened. Even dazed and hurting, the thunder god was deadly. He flicked his fingers and lightning spurted from the agents’ open mouths as they screamed.

“Let’s go,” Bruce warned, and Tony’s blanket fluttered to the ground. “This is not something I wanted to do,” He said, then pressed a hand against the RT. In the dimness of the warehouse, Steve made out glowing lines flickering to life along Tony’s torso and down his arms, a faint blue in the faint yellow of the lightbulbs. In a familiar gesture, the nanites crawled over his chest, but they instead only covered one arm. A high-powered gun sprung out, and Tony pointed it at the remaining thugs. Natasha hit Vendetta over the head with a pipe and casually cast it aside in the same movement. The rest of the AIM agents raised their hands in surrender, and Thor huffed against Steve’s shoulder.

“Okay,” Tony said dismissively, letting the gun go back to wherever the extra nanoparticles were stored (and Steve was starting to have sneaking suspicions about that particular piece of tech). “This was a fun field trip, everybody, so if we could just—” He stumbled over his own feet for a moment, and Natasha came from nowhere to steady him. “—pack it up, if we could just pack it up, that would be _great—”_

The incident was cleaned up after the Avengers left. Not that the Avengers cared—all that they cared about was what happened when they stepped outside. And what they saw in the new light that the sun provided.

Tony’s chest, despite his best efforts to curl in on himself, was a mess of scar tissue; it looked like the area around the RT was actually made up of synthetic skin, and it made Steve wonder how deep this technology really went. Metal strips, flawlessly integrated into his skin, ran down his sides and arms, across his shoulders, up his neck. They all converged at the RT node, and they flexed with Tony's movements. It was elegant as it was horrifying.

“Holy shit,” Clint breathed. Natasha’s lips parted, and Steve just felt numb; his arm slackened from its position around Thor’s shoulders. Before Steve realized what he had done, Thor wavered and then seemed to make the decision to sit down on a cinderblock before he fell down. Bruce uttered a protest and went to poke at the wound in his side. Neither seemed in the least surprised by the development, and although Bruce’s eyes had gleamed with interest and pain, Thor seemed almost entirely disinterested.

And then it clicked.

Hint one. Hint two. Hint three. Hints four and five and six and seven. Thor studying Tony’s chest with Valkyrie, the long sleeves, the flashes of metal. Thor had _known,_ and it seemed like Bruce had suspected. It had all been—

“What?” Tony said, and then he finally glanced down at himself. “Oh. Funny story about that, actually—”

Steve wasn’t expecting the white-hot anger that fizzed through his veins and down into his fingers. He clenched his jaw so hard it hurt. “What have you _done_ to yourself, Tony?”

  
  
Bruce looked up sharply, and Tony’s mouth formed a silent _O._ Thor sighed and pressed his fingers against his forehead. “Steve, this isn’t the best time for this—”

  
  
“Why do you have to keep hurting yourself?” Steve demanded, and Tony stared at him.

“What,” He said blankly.

“Why did you—just— _this!”_ Steve managed, his tongue disobeying his brain. “How deep does that even go?”

  
  
“It connects to his nervous system,” Bruce said absentmindedly, tugging Thor’s hands away from his face. Steve made a sound of disbelief, and Tony winced. “Could’ve put that nicer, Brucie-Bear.”

  
  
Deflection. Of course. Steve wasn’t sure how many times Tony had done that over the past few years, few months, few _days._ He had fallen for it countless times when the team was just formed, when their brains were still stuck in the _solo_ mindset and no one could work together well enough to be useful. But Steve had been dealing with fake-Tony and real-Tony for years now. He knew how to channel the authentic one.

Steve stepped fowards, and Tony stepped back, curling an arm protectively around his ribs. Steve froze at the connotations, but pressed onwards. “You’re always sacrificing yourself. You just don’t understand that we can sacrifice, too—”

  
  
“You don’t get it, Cap,” Tony snapped. _“This was my choice!”_

And Steve stopped. Tony stormed off and nearly fell when he was climbing the ramp to the Quinjet. Steve stayed for cleanup rather than be on that too-small plane, and he thought and he thought and he thought. 

Two days later, he was finally starting to understand.

Between conversations with Pepper, with Thor, with Bruce and Natasha and Clint and Rhodey and anyone who he could convince to talk about Tony, Steve pieced together the puzzle. The puzzle of New York, of Loki and Chitauri and _fear,_ of paranoia leading to sleepless nights leading to more innovation, more sleeplessness. The puzzle of reactors and Extremis and Pepper and _Rhodey,_ tumbling out of the sky, _Tony, I’m flying dead stick._ Broken ribs from a vibranium shield that Steve never wanted to touch again, two active Avengers, synthetic skin, surgeries _just in case there’s a monster in the closet instead of, you know—Shirts._

The monster in the closet finally came out to bite, and the dominoes fell. Steve decided to never judge Tony ever again.

Steve got a final, final hint about something else entirely when he accidentally walked into the workshop at exactly the wrong moment. He caught the faint sound of a recorded voice, desperate and thin, saying, _“—don’t feel so good,”_ and he froze. The chair in front of the monitor squeaked as Tony shifted his weight, and Steve noticed that FRIDAY didn’t say a word about the new presence in the lab as Steve stood in the doorway. Tony hadn’t heard him come in.

A kid. It was a kid. It was _the_ kid, the one from the airport, the one who had saluted Steve and stolen his shield and then made pop-culture references for the rest of the fight. At least, Steve thought so—he was in a new suit, a Stark suit, and his face was drawn and he down stared at his arms apprehensively.

Tony’s voice came from offscreen, and Tony dug his hands into his hair. _“You’re alright,”_ The recording said, and Steve realized what was happening.

_“I don’t know what’s happening,”_ Spider-Man said, and stumbled on weak legs towards the camera on Tony’s suit. _“I don’t know what’s happening—”_ And suddenly the kid was clutching onto the onscreen Tony, and the screen becomes a blur of orange skies and hazy metal.

_“I don’t want to go,”_ Spider-Man choked out, and Tony’s hands were shaking in his hair. “Boss,” FRIDAY said, but Tony said, “Leave it, FRI,” and the AI shut up.

_“I don’t want to go, Mr. Stark, please—”_ The kid was saying, tears thick in his voice, and Steve held back a scream. _“I don’t wanna go, I don’t wanna go—”_

  
  
It seems like onscreen-Tony had flipped the kid over to lean against something, because the kid’s face was visible again, pale and terrified. He stared up at Tony, at the camera, muttered, _“I’m sorry,”_ and dissolved into ash under Tony’s fingers.

At the sudden lack of resistance, the camera lurched forwards and then cut out.

Steve remembered that he was standing in the back of Tony’s workshop a second before Tony went to turn, and he took a few steps forward and said, “Tony,” just as the billionaire spun around in his chair, eyes wet.

“Rogers—” And then Tony was scrambling up, scrubbing at his eyes, trying to fix his hair, then glaring at the chair when it tumbled onto its side. “What the _hell,_ Rogers, what are you doing—”

  
  
“I’m sorry,” Steve interrupted, feeling something rise up into his throat. “God, Tony, I’m so sorry.”

Tony stopped for a second. Closed his eyes.

“He was just a kid,” Tony choked out before Steve was crossing the room in three long strides and wrapping him up in a hug. And surprisingly, Tony let him.

The shaking Avenger sank into the embrace, burying his face into Steve’s chest. And after a few seconds, hesitantly, Tony hugged him back.

For the first time, Steve noticed he was wearing short sleeves.

Tony was still trembling. Steve could feel the metal accents through his shirt, running up his spine. Tony stiffened as Steve’s fingers touched the paths the metal traced up his back, but relaxed after a moment.

“You really can’t take a hint, can you?” Tony muttered after a moment, sounding significantly more collected than he had been. He pulled away, a steely glint in his eye and no fabric covering his most incredible invention ever. “Thanos is mine."

“I can take a hint sometimes,” Steve rejoined. “I gathered. Although Thor might have a legitimate claim to the death blow, too.”

  
  
Tony waved an idle hand. “We’ll hash it out once we get there.” The metal on his arms gleamed in the light, and for the first time since Siberia, Steve and Tony smiled together.

**Author's Note:**

> THANKS SO MUCH! And sorry for the long wait between updates. It's been wild. 
> 
> I told you guys Peter was in this... hehe. Anyway, UPDATES!
> 
> The fics _will_ be Watching Avengers: Infinity War and a Justice League/Avengers crossover. I cannot guarantee which will come first. I cannot guarantee when they will come. If y'all have been patient for a month already without complaining... then I've got some great people here. I have made some pretty good progress writing out the script of Infinity War and I have some ideas about the crossover. I also have ideas that are neither! I dunno. If you want updates, I'll probably put them up on my profile occasionally. I can almost guarantee I will have something else up by Christmas! I know that seems like a while, but trust me, time flies. 
> 
> Thank you guys so much! And for the random readers who found this, thanks for reading!
> 
> x


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